IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Be A Campaign Reporter
An article in The New Republic almost makes you feel sorry for journalists, who are now in the home stretch of “the longest, most sustained campaign on record” and are “running on little more than the scant sustenance of yet another slice of pizza,” may come home to a broken marriage, and who have been forced to “eat together, drink together, work together, sleep together - in the same place, that is - every day for 18 months.” But then, you remember how they savaged Joe The Plumber and realize that you wish a far worse Hell for them than this:
CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley has taken to running through a checklist before bed. Every night she travels with the Obama campaign, she orders a wake-up call, sets one regular alarm and one back-up on her cell phone, which she places strategically out of slapping distance across the room. Then she writes down her vitals: What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it? With that, she can drift off before the next day's campaign coverage. Most of the time, though, Crowley is so scared to oversleep that she's awake and waiting, long before the alarm - any one of them - ever rings.
“After the previous campaign, it took me a good month to stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that I've missed something,”
“After a while, you just miss your house, you know?" she said from
For a bunch of inveterate navel-gazers, some journalists can be remarkably unselfaware, as when The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza laments that there is nothing left to write about: “The one conversation I keep having with reporters is, '’what the hell do we write about? What are the interesting stories left to cover in this election?’ There are a lot of people scratching their heads trying to find a new angle at the end.”
How’s this for something new to write about?: One of Obama’s mentors and surrogate fathers as a teenager in Hawaii was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA, and Obama’s early political career was been propelled by the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Another of Obama’s mentors and surrogate fathers was Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a black liberation theologian, and when Obama was in a position to dole out grant money he chose to fund individuals and organizations promoting an Afrocentric curriculum that teaches ancient Egyptians were black (which is news to modern Egyptians, BTW) and that they pioneered manned flight and the theory of evolution. In their last presidential debate, John McCain made a point of saying that he “admires” Obama's “eloquence,” but warned that “you really have to pay attention to [his] words.” We all know that actions speak louder than words and time and again Obama’s actions suggest his private beliefs are not just liberal, but extremist. Isn’t it time the MSM delved into who Barack Obama really is?
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